When preaching, I am often trying to help those I’m presenting to understand that spiritual growth must move beyond that of attaining more spiritual knowledge. We must grow in faith in order to entrust God with our lives. Simply growing in knowledge without increasing our faith in God does us no good.

The value of our understanding of the Word of God is found when we let go of the world and its false information for how we should live our lives and live more according to what God says we should do. This, on face value, is very hard to do. Why? Because we are so accustomed to living our lives without God and not according to His ways.

What is “normal” for us is to live our lives
without knowledge of God and His ways.

A classic example of this from the Scriptures is that of Abram (later named Abraham) in the book of Genesis.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’ ” Gen. 12:1 NRSV

In our life today, if our spouse came home and said, “Honey, guess what? I just heard God say that we need to move all of our family right away,”  most of us would begin to investigate what this was all about. We would start asking questions like: “Where are we moving to?”  If they then responded with, “I don’t know, He said He would tell us later”, we would then rise up and dismiss this because it sounded ludicrous.

Instead of trusting them, we would then call into question their mental health because people don’t (1) hear God speak, and (2) change their lives drastically without having a clear understanding of what is going to happen.  Unless there is a clear rationale of either a plan for benefit in the future or an impending doom that precipitates our need to move, we tend to stay securely in place.

That wasn’t the case for Abram. In fact, he was quite different. He heard the word of God, believed the word of God, and acted on the word of God.  It was because of that faith in God that he was credited as righteous in the eyes of God. Now he is known as the father of all who have authentic faith in God.

He gives us a credible example of having a kind of faith that has teeth in it! It is more than lip service. It is made of substance in that, when God calls, you are not only able, but willing to move.

Do we have this kind of faith, that belief that when God is calling, He is ALWAYS PROVIDING?

Or, do we require of God more information before we will obey His call?

For those of us in ministry, this is a critical piece of the puzzle we must have. Otherwise, it is the absence of that faith that will keep us disobediently still, and, once again, in His way.